Will someone please give Annaleigh Ashford a biscuit?
After a star-making supporting turn in Kinky Boots and a Tony-winning stint as a would-be ballerina in You Can’t Take it With You, Ashford finally takes the stage in a lead role. And she does it on all fours.
Ashford plays the title character in AR Gurney’s Sylvia, a comedy as predictable as it is indestructible. Sylvia is a winsome stray whom dreamy banker Greg (Matthew Broderick) finds lolloping in New York’s Central Park. In an innocuous answer to a midlife crisis, he brings Sylvia home, much to the displeasure of his wife, Kate (Julie White), an English teacher who is done with dogs.
And shouldn’t we be done with plays like Sylvia? It is antiquated, it is self-congratulatory, it is conservative in both form and content with its focus on the non-problems of upper-middle-class white New Yorkers. (Sylvia is white, too, or perhaps golden.)
But if you have ever loved a pet, it is almost impossible not to feel moved by the interspecies romance of Greg and Sylvia or to tear up when they sing Every Time We Say Goodbye. (Kate joins in, too.)
The schtick of the play is that Greg and Kate, like all pet owners, anthropomorphise their animal. They speak to Sylvia like a person and they imagine her responses as more or less logical and grammatical. Dressed in a fuzzy sweater, Daisy Dukes, a velour bodysuit, and a collar, her jumble of blond hair spilling to her shoulders, she looks less like a dog than like some bridge-and-tunnel teen on a tear. And her acting isn’t particularly doggy either, although there’s a way she tosses her head that does suggest the canine.
But there’s something sunshiny and genuinely irrepressible about her that transcends any species categories. (And which also serves to make Kate seem like a real pill.) How could anyone not love Sylvia? Especially when she says, “Excuse me, I have to check my messages,” and then hunkers down, nose to the ground, sniffing exuberantly.
Sylvia was written in 1995, so that makes it pretty old in dog years. The director Daniel Sullivan can’t teach it many new tricks, but he can give it a typically adroit and able production. Broderick, who sometimes underplays his roles, is a glove-like fit for the moony, diffident Greg. White plays Kate as tightly wound, but not entirely unsympathetic and she allows herself a few moments to showcase the daffiness she otherwise keeps buttoned up and belted in. Robert Sella, in a variety of roles, oversells his punchlines, but he still has a way of making them very funny.
But make no mistake, it’s Ashford’s play. There is no curbing this dog.
